Barrington Watson (1931 - 2016) - Jamaica Artist

Born in 1931 January 9th in Lucea, Barrington Watson made his original mark in Jamaica as a football player for Kingston College. However, he ultimately followed his artistic yearnings by enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London at the age of 20. Watson also studied at Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. He travelled widely and then returned to the first Director of Studies at the Jamaica School of Art and co-founded the Contemporay Jamaican Artists' Association (1964–74). He later served as visiting professor at Spelman College. In 1967 he won a prize at the first Spanish Biennale at Barcelona. In 2000 he was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. 

Watson has exhibited throughout Jamaica and internationally. He is the subject of Lennie Little-White's 2015 documentary film They Call Me Barrington.

Dawn Scott was a Jamaican-born artist and cultural commentator. Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at the Grosvenor Galleries in Kingston. By far her most impactful exhibition, however, was her contribution to Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), the National Gallery’s (and Jamaica’s) first exhibition of installation art. On this occasion, she produced A Cultural Object, a haunting, spiral-shaped “zinc fence” structure which transposed some of the realities of Jamaica’s inner city life into the gallery spaces of the National Gallery. She taught textile art at the School of Visual Arts, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where she also served as an external examiner. She was also active as a fashion designer, and her handmade, hand-dyed clothes were in great demand locally in the 1980s and early 1990s. She  received the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary Medal in 1979 and a Bronze Musgrave Medal for merit in the Visual Arts in 1999. A Cultural Object was acquired by the National Gallery and is now on view in a gallery of its own in the permanent exhibitions, where it is one of the most popular exhibits.  

I am a Haitian American artist. Born in Haiti and grew up in NYC. I attended Lycée Français in NY from elementary school to High School. I came to the States at the age of 4 years old. I returned to PAP to live with my family from 8 to 12 years old. I always wanted to be a painter. I remember being a toddler and seeing a Logo being painted on my great-grandparents' Radio Station in PAP and thinking to myself That’s what I want to do in the future. Back in Queens, NY. During adolescence, my Mom put up blockages on my trajectory to becoming an artist. But I studied art anyway in whichever way that I could. I studied art for a year formally in Florence Italy. This is where I met my first lover who was a graphic artist.. He influenced me a lot. I later studied Interior Design in Graduate School. The east village of Manhattan had a big influence on my artistic journey during the late 1980’s and 1990s. I later fell ill and struggled with a life threatening illness that took me to come and live in Miami. I struggled for 10 years before I recovered and applied to Art Center on Lincoln Rosd and became a professional artist.

After a few successes I completed my residency at the Center. I drifted and stopped working on art full time for many years. Then in 2019 I went to Quito Ecuador for a residency for 3 months! That took me back on my true path.

Iyaga Ibo Mandingo is a painter of Antigua, West Indies, who came to the United States in 1980 as a young boy. He studied fine arts at Southern Connecticut State University and teaches in the tri-state area as a Master Teaching Artist.

Aexia is a writer who grew up in both Jamaica and the United States of America. She writes about the variability of experiences of black identity of immigrants from African countries, Jamaica, and other countries of the West Indies, from recent immigrants to those brought over during slavery. Her writings include short stories about community, generations, mermaids, sexuality, and more. She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize.

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Colin Channer was born in Jamaica. His ten books as a fiction writer, poet, and editor include Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), a Finalist for a 2023 New England Book Award. His prose and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bomb, The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly, and other venues. A social entrepreneur, Channer is a co-founder of the not-for-profi Calabash International Literrary Festival and served as the organization’s artistic director and board chairman from 2001-2012, guiding it from inception to maturity as a leading presenter of writing workshops, literary performances, publishing seminars, and film screenings—all at no cost to the public—passion being the only price of entry. 

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Nadia L. Hohn is a Canadian educator and children's book author. She has earned critical acclaim for her books for young readers, including her debut picture book, Malaika's Costume. Born in Canada to Jamaican immigrant parents, Hohn grew up and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she is an elementary school teacher.

Thomas Glave is an American academic and author. Born to Jamaican parents in The Bronx, New York, Glave grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. He earned a B.A. degree from Bowdoin College in 1993 (Cum laude, English and Latin American Studies) and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1998. He is a member of the English faculty at Binghamton University, where he teaches creative writing and courses on Caribbean, African-American, black British, postcolonial, and L.G.B.T./queer literatures, among other topics.[1] Glave possesses dual Jamaican and U.S. citizenship. He is gay.

Patricia Powell is a Jamaican writer, who  She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. Since 2009, she has been on the English faculty at Mills College. Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence.